


Muddied Water

by BenevolentErrancy



Category: Horizon: Zero Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Gen, Indecision, Post-The Proving, Pre-A Seeker At The Gates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-27
Updated: 2017-06-27
Packaged: 2018-11-19 19:29:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11320125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BenevolentErrancy/pseuds/BenevolentErrancy
Summary: In a single moment, Aloy's entire world has changed. She now stares out through the rain at a world where she has no friends, no family, and a duty to people she owes nothing to.It is a moment where the indecision is nearly crushing, and All-Mother help her, her guide is dead.





	Muddied Water

**Author's Note:**

> I have literally just started this game and I am completely in love with it, so I wanted to do a quick character study to try to help me figure Aloy out a bit better.
> 
> That being said, please please PLEASE no spoilers. Please, I beg you.

_Seeker_.

The word bounced about her mind like the rain did as it pounded against the stones along the path, each drop landing with such impact that it seemed to shatter and spread and ripple across an already grey world. The rain was heavy enough that it was nearly a mist in its own right, a heavy curtain obscuring everything and churning the road to mud. It felt right, that it was raining. Though Aloy knew nothing of metaphoric symbolism or pathetic fallacies, the deep conviction sat in her gut that rain was truly the only possible companion on a day like this. Miserable, drenching, it sat so heavy in her hair and furs and leathers, that it felt like a great weight had been laid across her shoulders.

An additional weight, one that alongside the weight of the word in her head. _Seeker_.

It was supposed to be an honour, and that was perhaps what made it all the worst. The tribespeople scowled or spat or stared in mute shock – horror – when they heard. Such an honour, given to this creature? This outcast? It didn't feel like an honour to Aloy. It felt like nothing. She had been sincere when she'd snidely remarked to Teersa that outcast or exile, it made little difference. Of course, the idea of leaving the Embrace, leaving her _home_ , was maddening, gut-wrenching, but in the grand scheme of things, it hadn't felt important. A small detail. She had already been beyond the walls with... with...

She had already been beyond the walls. The rest was merely a matter of distance.

So being given a title, being given _permission_ had made her lips curl – it felt like the worst kind of presumption. It had never been Teersa's to _deny_ , she had no rights to Aloy, none, and the implication that she believed she could guide or stay Aloy's hand had made her hackles raise. Aloy followed Rost's requests, but that was because he had earned her respect and her trust – and even then, not always.

 _Though she_ does _have a right to deny you, doesn't she?_ Aloy thought to herself as she hauled her rain-laden quiver more securely across her shoulder. _I'm Nora now. I'm a Brave. First among my yearlings, most of whom are dead._

A Seeker.

The wall rose in front of her. It was the first time in her life it had ever felt ominous. Sometimes it had felt restrictive, often it had felt mysterious, sometimes even intimidating, when she had been young and Rost had tried to scare her with stories of the godless lands and creatures beyond the Embrace. Mostly, it hadn't looked like anything. It had always been there, and had faded into the background life of living in the wilds, important only as a landmark when she had still been learning the trails.

Though she would likely be able to find at least some scant shelter in its lee, Aloy found herself slowing and finally stopping as she stared up at it, her thoughts still fretting and bubbling like a muddy little creek gouged into soft ground by the heavy rain.

Today should have felt like a victory. Maybe that was what she resented the most. That all of this, everything, had decided to happen _today_. She had been working for this moment for over a decade of her life, had spent every backbreaking, grueling day pushing her body into a weapon that would succeed for her. She had made her muscles hard and her skills resolute, forged herself into a spear, into a _hammer_ that would break free the truth that had so long been denied her. Today was the day she was meant to march into the Mother's Heart, snatch victor from the Nora that had so long looked down on her, prove herself not only their equal but their better for her suffering. She was meant to find not just truth, but also community – she had thought, hoped, prayed to the All-Mother during the particularly dark, lonely, desperate nights, that once she won she would be accepted. That people would _talk_ to her. That her world would expand beyond Rost, that she would meet faces rather than turned backs.

She had been ignorant and naïve. That knowledge stung like bile. For a long time she had considered herself grown, mature, a woman and a warrior, and it stung to realize how childish she had truly been in her hopes. Not only did the Nora _not_ respect her, _not_ welcome her, despite now being one of their own, but she had lost all the more. Vala, the one person she had thought might be... well, be a friend, maybe, she didn't really know what those were like but... maybe. She was gone. Dead. Because Aloy had been too slow, too weak, too foolish to kill the archers and save them.

(What was she supposed to do? She had never hunted humans. She had never killed, not truly. Animals and Machines, they were _different_. The mechanics were the same, her skills were as sharp as they had ever been, but she had hesitated that first moment, with her arrow drawn and carefully aimed at a very human head. And then they had been overwhelmed. She wanted to scream and cry and beg that there was nothing she could have done, it had been too much even for her. But even thinking that excuse felt like a mockery to teaching that had guided her life – there was no such thing as too much, only too little preparation, too little skill. If she had been better, her first potential friend would be alive now.)

And not just Vala. Not even the other Proving participants.

Rost.

Just thinking it made something thick and choking rise in her throat. Her eyes burned. _Rost_.

Rost was dead.

Rost had told her a story, about a fox that had made a fine kill, only to see its reflection in the water. It had been so overcome by greed at the sight of the reflected fox's big, fat kill, that it had lunged, trying to steal it away, and in the process had lost its own meal to the river's swift current, biting at something it could never have. She felt like that fox, felt it to her bones. She had been so desperate for any sort of human contact, that now she had lost the only one that had ever mattered and was reward with nothing but an empty ache in her gut.

Rost was _dead_.

It felt unreal.

(The only thing that kept her denying it entirely was the unavoidable way her body ached and burned in the chill of the rain, still recovering first from the fight on the Provings ground and the crushing fall off the edge of the mountain, and then most recently from the fight with that massive, corrupted Machine. Despite the bitter healing herbs she had crushed into her mouth, her ribs still stung with every breath of cold air she took, from where that thing's twisting, metal arm had slammed her into a building.)

Rost had always been invincible. Even when he had been injured, during a dangerous hunt or a difficult climb, he had never stopped. He had always been her first and last lines of defense. Even when he had told her he would leave once she'd been accepted by the Nora, she hadn't acknowledged it. She could track, he had taught her. She would win the Provings, and then hunt to the ends of the world if she had to in order to find Rost. There was no world she could imagine without him – _he_ was the one who had built and shaped her world.

And now he was gone from it, and it was all the colder for it.

(The worst thing, perhaps, was that no one else seemed to care. Teersa had assured her that he had been buried up at their home, but no one else she spoke to seemed to know him or know what he had done, how he had saved her. He had slipped from the world silently, without a ripple, while wrenching hers out from under her feet. How was that fair? He had been a better, more deserving man than any of these Nora hunters who had had the nerve to survive.)

Staring at the wall, she considered the branching futures that lay before her. Maybe she should turn around. Leave. She should go visit Rost's grave, surely? Had anyone thought to sing hymns over it, or do the devotionals? Aloy had never been very religious, having realized long ago, in the heart of her childhood, that no amount of praying would send the All-Mother – any mother, for that matter – down to her. Everything she and Rost possessed, they got on their own, no matter what Rost believed about the All-Mother guiding their footsteps or guiding their bows. Rost had been the one to guide hers, and now he was gone. But that wasn't the important part right now, was it? The important thing was that Rost would want someone to pray to the All-Mother for him, to pray for his soul and the washing clean of sins and for a welcome place back in her eternal embrace. And Rost deserved all of that. She should be attending to it – who else would help an outcast but one of their own? Just as Rost had upheld tradition and blessed her name as an infant, it must surely be her duty to uphold it in his honour and bless his passing.

She took one step away from the gate, and then another. The rain made each step squelch. With her back to the gate and the rain pounding a coarse staccato against her hunched shoulders, she hurried a few steps down the path before stopping again.

She was running away and she knew it. No matter what lies she tried to tell herself, it was obvious. But running away from what? That was less obvious. Running away from the monsters beyond the Embrace? Running away from the unknown lands, so distant and separate from her own? Running away from the Nora and their vitriol and their responsibilities? Running away from the strange, sinister mystery that she had just come to learn was bubbling somewhere beneath the surface of their lives? Running away from a world in which she didn't even have Rost anymore?

It didn't matter, she was being a coward. Rost would have told her so.

She owed the Nora nothing. And though the feeling of power that came with the title was heady, she resented the duty with which they had saddled her. She had never asked anyone for anything. She and Rost had provide for themselves and for one another, but now at the first opportunity the Nora flinched from their own tasks, their own dead, and gave the burden to her. And yet... she had to go. The thought of that one man and his malfunctioning Focus was still heavy in her mind. The thought of the All-Mother, her own mother, the short-haired woman, and the Sacred Mountain looking so much like the defiled, sinful Metal World they were warned away from... she couldn't shake these thoughts. And if she ran away into her forests and mountains, they would not leave her. Nor would these new, metal monsters – even if she was not with the Tribe, she would feel the sting of these corrupted Machines.

You did the work in front of you. Whatever you wanted, you earned. That was what Rost had taught her. She had cut her own firewood, she had repaired her home, she had strengthened her body and learned to hunt and learned to heal and learned to scavenge and learned to stitch and learned every other lesson Rost could think to teach her. She had learned to hunt and prepare and preserve their food, had learned to build what they needed, and had learned how to trade for the rest. As soon as she had been old enough, big enough, to entrust with that sort of responsibility, she had done every job needed of her, and would she let that change now, before Rost was even cold in the ground?

No. There was something out there. Some sort of monster or sickness or evil that she did not yet have a name for. It had destroyed her home, plagued her life, ruined her future. It had killed Rost.

She owed this... _entity_ a reckoning. _That_ was the job in front of her.

And... and there were a few others. Karst, still out in the wilderness, facing all the dangers that these new Machines posed. And that boy she had saved so many years before, Teb; he had set aside his hand-sewn garments for ones of a Brave warrior, taken on a duty he was not trained for. Would he die, trying to defend his people?

Rost had told her over the corpse of a Sawtooth, that she must think for others besides herself. Well, she had at least two now to think of, that was something, she supposed.

She sighed, but it was lost in the rain. Likely no one would ever appreciate the indecision that had plagued her, or know how deeply and chaotically this choice had weighed on her... how close she had been to choosing something else. Turning slowly, Aloy again readjusted her weapons so that they sat more comfortably on her wet shoulder, and marched resolutely towards the gate.

 


End file.
